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Updated: May 2, 2025
This proof of confidence the object of much secret envy is, to women, a field-marshal's baton. Women are then, so to speak, mistresses at home. After this, nothing, not even the memory of the honey-moon, can be compared to Adolphe's happiness for several days. A woman, under such circumstances, is all sugar.
Here Adolphe or any other man in Adolphe's place resembles a certain Languedocian peasant who suffered agonies from an agacin, or, in French, corn, but the term in Lanquedoc is so much prettier, don't you think so? This peasant drove his foot at each step two inches into the sharpest stones along the roadside, saying to the agacin, "Devil take you! Make me suffer again, will you?"
"What brutality!" says Caroline, rising and going away with her handkerchief at her eyes. The country house, so ardently longed for by Caroline, has now become a diabolical invention of Adolphe's, a trap into which the fawn has fallen. Since Adolphe's discovery that it is impossible to reason with Caroline, he lets her say whatever she pleases.
Adolphe's education, however, was wholly French; for Madame Linders, who, during her husband's life, had not ceased to mourn over her exile from her own city, lost no time, after his death, in returning to Paris with her two children, Thérèse, a girl of about twelve, and Adolphe, then a child five or six years old.
A quizzical idea enters Adolphe's head, and he replies, winking with one eye only: "I have just seen him." "Where?" "In front of the Cafe de Paris, with some friends." "But why have you come back?" says Caroline, trying to conceal her murderous fury. "Madame Foullepointe, who was tired of Charles, you said, has been with him at Ville d'Avray since yesterday."
Adolphe is dining with the Deschars: twelve persons are at table, and Caroline is seated next to a nice young man named Ferdinand, Adolphe's cousin. Between the first and second course, conjugal happiness is the subject of conversation. "There is nothing easier than for a woman to be happy," says Caroline in reply to a woman who complains of her husband.
Pierre was another employee of the printing house, Adolphe's comrade in his study of the mysteries of Paris streets, and now his rival. They were both in love with the same girl, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the keeper of 'La Prunelle' Café, and her favor was often the prize of the morning's game. "Now and then this rivalry between the two young Parisians would drop into a hand-to-hand fight.
The traqueurs also, whom Adolphe catechised, in the hope of preserving his own skin entire at the same time, though they gave him all sorts of good advice, failed not to add to it, as people of their class generally do, a budget of most fearful histories and hair-breadth escapes of horses and dogs ripped open, and men killed or gored; but that which put a finishing-stroke to Adolphe's courage, was the entrance of a friend of mine, who had himself been a sad sufferer in one of these adventures.
I confess to you, with the cowardice of true passion, that if he were taken from me I should die. That dreadful book of Benjamin Constant, 'Adolphe, tells us only of Adolphe's sorrows; but what about those of the woman, hey? The man did not observe them enough to describe them; and what woman would have dared to reveal them? They would dishonor her sex, humiliate its virtues, and pass into vice.
Left on his own after the capture of my brother early in the campaign, he had followed the 16th Chasseurs to Moscow and taken part in the retreat, while caring for my brother Adolphe's three horses, of which he had refused to sell a single one in spite of many offers.
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